1. Talk to the end user

It boggles my mind that people don’t consider the risks of building an application without engaging the end user from the beginning.

You can save a lot of time and money by talking to the end user about your application early, better yet show them a design, encourage and listen to their feedback.

Ask them.“Why would you use this application or feature?”. This can save a lot of unnecessary cost in the long run.

“We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want. We must discover whether we are on a path that will lead to growing a systainable business” - Eric Ries

2. Design

You don’t ever want to hear your users say: “This isn’t how I imagined that feature working, this won’t work ”.

Writing code takes effort, often the more complex the feature the greater the effort, and the development cost.

You can significantly impact your development spend by investing in good design. Its also a great way to think more deeply about how your application will work.

You wouldn’t build a house without the design and plans would you? So don’t build your application without these either. In the long run it will save you not only money, but also time, repetition and stress.

3. Prototype

How do you know for sure if people want your application?

With apps like http://www.invisionapp.com/ you can build a prototype without writing any code.

Gather and arrange images and components together so you can test with your target audience to get a true sense of whether your application is something they will use.

4. Build the software

If you’ve done the above you should feel very confident that you’re on the right track and, if you’re still feeling excited about your idea, then you’re set up will to build something that’s going to be used.

It’s time to code!

Not all code is created equal. This is an entire blog post in itself, I’ll talk about this a little later.

5. Know how you’re going to acquire users

Not knowing where your customers will come from, is even worse than not talking to a selection of those users before you start development.

Your application can be fantastic but unless you have a pipeline of people you know you’re going to put it in front of, no one will know about it, no one will talk about it and no one will value it.

Simple points, that I hope have started you thinking. If you want to speak more about how NetEngine can help you bring your ideas to life, let’s organise a quick chat.